PoetryThomas Kinsella once remarked of Austin Clarke that "the selected poems would be the great book". The same is not quite true of his own Selected - looking through it, a number of crucial omissions spring to mind - but this, nonetheless, is one of the best-balanced of all his books. It begins as it ends, with short meditations in free form, but the end is better than the beginning.
Kinsella, like Adrienne Rich or Robert Lowell in the United States, is one of those poets who have very visibly broken away, on the page, from their earlier, more formalised selves.
Less obvious, perhaps, are the continuities. Of these, a new reader might note the rich seam of love poetry running through the lifework - from the early gracefulness of A Lady of Quality, through the sexual and marital evolutions of Crysalides and the Wormwood sequence, to the late domestic tenderness of The Familiar and a poem not included here, The Furnace:
Male and Female
In punishment for Man's will
And reminded of our Fall.
In token of which
I plant this dry kiss
In your rain-wet hair.
These are not so much love poems of the intense instant as of the long attritional process - a zone Kinsella has colonised almost singlehandedly - of living together. If marriage, as his mentor Auden once remarked, is the subject, no one has so laid open its inner workings.
Then there is the division, emerging early and staying to the end, between Irish matter - wonderful Dublin poems such as Dick King - and what might be termed universal concerns: the atomic bomb in Old Harry, which also is not here, and the enlargement of neutral Irish conscience coming to terms with the Holocaust in Downstream, which is.
We saw the barren world obscurely
lit
By tall chimneys flickering in their
pall
The haunt of swinish man. Each day a
spit
That, turning, sweated war. Each
night a fall
Back to the evil dream where rodents
ply,
Man-rumped, sow-headed, busy with
whip and maul
Among nude herds of the damned.
But it is not really until his move to the United States, the loosening of formal structures and the adoption of a new, ironising voice that the larger issues of power, anonymity and the fate of the planet, addressed in such poems as The Good Fight and Crab Orchard Sanctuary, find their proper place alongside the Irish concerns. It was this side of Kinsella, the willingness to apply his large poetic intelligence to wider issues at a time - the early 1970s - of national introversion on both sides of the Border, that first excited me as a student. To come back, now, to the work, and find a late meditation such as Marcus Aurelius is to feel that first intuition wonderfully confirmed.
He himself, notable in his time and
place,
And a major figure as later times
would agree
(though for reasons that would have
surprised his fellow-citizens)
Was in a false position:
Part Cavafy, in its historical humour, and partly the Brecht of "Those who lead the state over a precipice/ Call governing too onerous/ For the common man", this faux-naif presentation of a late Roman emperor opens up the ageless, placeless spectacle of power as a cocktail of the ludicrous and the brutal, sweetened with a dash of culture. It will not be read by those it is about.
WHAT IT DOES, however, is set the tone for the most recent sequences in the poet's Peppercanister series of his own work in progress, especially Man of War, which is less about bloody actualities than an exploration of emotional detachment in the bureaucratic classes that plan wars others have to suffer, in the name of an abstract order. Rage against bureaucratic evil has been a constant in Kinsella since he departed the Irish Civil Service in the 1960s. Here, it is honed to a Swiftian intensity.
Failing which, I modestly propose
Sending the leaders
And all responsible for the decisions
And free of bodily contact until now
Naked against each other in a pit
Granting the victory to a lone
survivor.
Man of War, unusually for Kinsella, is a response to a commission. Though one remembers Auden again, suggesting that all poems are essentially commissioned, whether we know it or not. In the second sequence, Belief and Unbelief, the commission would seem to be from somewhere deep in the biological unconscious, no longer the public realm of Man of War. But the flux and savagery are much the same.
The doctor halted
At the foot of the bed
In his hospital coat.
In his late twenties.
Recently qualified,
To my dazed respect.
Our eyes
Feeding on each other.
Nobody since Ted Hughes, and perhaps the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, has so demythologised nature, breaking it down to a state of mutual devourings, in which the human too is complicit. But the true evil, against which various attempts at prayer and transcendence are set in this second sequence, is, as in Man of War, the instinct for power.
And remember that My ways
Will justify in the end
The seeker after justice
And not the power seeker
Crumpled in his corner.
Irish poets of a certain age, tormented by the unrepeatable example of the later Yeats, are jockeying a little too obviously for the mantle of prophet, trying too hard for the world-historical note. Thomas Kinsella, by dint of a dry, compassionate irony, perfected over half a lifetime, seems to have slipped quietly past that myth to a late excellence all his own, containing, every so often, the only thing that matters, the moment of moral knowledge.
A turning away
From regard beyond proper merit,
Or reward beyond real need,
Toward the essence and the source.
Harry Clifton's Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004 is due from Wake Forest in September
Selected Poems By Thomas Kinsella Carcanet, 184pp. £9.95 Man of War Peppercanister Number 26. €12 Belief and Unbelief Peppercanister Number 27. €12